The rare move came after the diplomat had been slandered and even beaten, and is a sign Ortega’s regime is no longer interested in pretending there is religious liberty in the country.
by Massimo Introvigne
Among the few friends Putin’s Russia maintains around the world, international media usually mention Nicaragua. However, diplomacy is not the strong point of the regime led by President Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo. Ortega has been made by Russia a member of its Order of Friendship, and has also been awarded the Order of Honor and Glory and the Order of Uatsamonga by the splinter pro-Putin Georgian pseudo-republics respectively of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Nicaragua has officially recognized these pseudo-states; the only other countries that did are Russia, Venezuela, Syria, and Nauru.
Last week, Nicaragua expelled the Vatican nuncio, Polish Archbishop Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag. On March 12, the Holy See reacted by expressing “great surprise and sadness” for the “incomprehensible” and undiplomatic expulsion. It is possible that, in addition to domestic reasons, the tense international situation motivated Ortega.
By expelling the nuncio, a rare move, Ortega signaled that he is not interested in maintaining even a pretense that there is religious liberty in Nicaragua, something Sommertag had casted in doubt. And for good reasons. Any criticism of the regime by the Catholic bishops and Sommertag himself was met with violence.
What is even rarer than an expulsion, in 2018 militias connected with Ortega’s ruling party entered the basilica of San Sebastián in Diriamba and physically attacked the nuncio as well as Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, who is the head of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, and the Auxiliary Bishop of Managua José Silvio Báez. The latter was wounded with a knife, and later had to flee the country after consistent death threats.
Ortega is an old Marxist who, in Cold War times, created in 1979 a pro-Soviet regime that had among its main opponents the Nicaraguan Catholic hierarchy, led by Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo. I interviewed Obando in 1986, and he was at that time a vitriolic critic of Ortega.
After he lost power in 1990, Ortega came back in 2007 and has remained President of Nicaragua ever since, periodically reconfirmed by elections increasingly deemed irregular and unreliable by international observers, the last one on November 7, 2021.
As part of his efforts to recapture power in the 2000 decade, Ortega sought reconciliation with the Catholic Church. In 2004, he met his former nemesis Obando and reportedly struck a deal. If he would regain the presidency, Ortega undertook to extend the Nicaraguan ban to abortion to all cases (which he eventually did) and to promote other items of the Catholic agenda. Ortega also toned down his Marxist rhetoric, and eventually declared himself a non-Marxist.
The reconciliation was consecrated by the Catholic marriage of Ortega and Murillo, which Obando publicly celebrated. At Obando’s directions, the Catholic Church also did not take a position on the accusations of Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo, a daughter of Murillo by a former marriage whom Ortega adopted and who had accused him of rape (she withdrew the accusations in 2008 but confirmed them in 2016 and has since maintained that she was indeed raped by her stepfather).
Obando was replaced as Archbishop of Managua in 2005 by the much less pro-Ortega Brenes, but continued to advise the President and to mediate between the regime and Catholic circles almost until he died at age 92 in 2018.
In the same year 2018, Nicaragua saw widespread protests about an economic crisis accompanied by an unpopular reform of social security. The Catholic bishops sided with the protesters, and also condemned the arrest and extra-judicial killings of hundreds of the opposition leaders that followed. They also criticized the 2021 elections, and some of the prelates called them a farce. The nuncio traveled to Rome after the elections to avoid participating in the inauguration of Ortega’s new mandate. In retaliation, Ortega abolished the figure of the “dean of the diplomatic corps,” a position traditionally reserved in Catholic countries for the Vatican ambassador.
Ortega’s own rhetoric escalated, and he called the bishops “vermin,” “foreign agents,” “subversive,” and more recently “terrorists.” Churches were repeatedly attacked, and devotees and priests beaten.
As the nuncio denounced the situation and sided with the bishops, he was also threatened, until the recent expulsion. The incident with the nuncio consolidated Nicaragua’s international image as a rogue and pariah state, which counts Russia and Venezuela among the few countries willing to deal with it.